On 14 Dec 2003 at 9:50, Philip Aker wrote: > On Sunday, December 14, 2003, at 08:47 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > > > With Panther I can now see that I actually get a lot more from OS X > > than I would ever have got from an updated OS 9. > > That was always the goal of OS X. It was perhaps difficult to see how > the merging of OS 9, NeXT, and Unix would coalesce in previous > versions, but it's clearly visible in 10.3. It took some guts on > Apple's part to pursue this vision.
Apple waited a long time to give its users a modern OS, and the longer the waited, the harder it became because of the entrenched practices in the development community. On the Wintel side, this problem was surmounted with the switch between DOS and Windows, which was *very* difficult and took more than half a decade. The one thing about OS X that I don't really understand is why a .x upgrade would break programs that ran well on the previous release. What's that about? Is Apple removing functionality that existed in the previous release? Surely they are not adjusting the base APIs with every release? Or, if they are, they're doing it in a way that wouldn't break applications written to the earlier API? Obviously, that can't be it -- would it be the window manager that is causing the problem (Aqua/Quartz)? Or? I simply don't know enough about it to understand what level is causing existing software to fail in the new releases. > I think the fairer assessment of MS vs Apple's backward compatibility > handling will come about whenever MS can get the Longhorn edition out > the door. Let's see how F2K2/F2K3 does on that system because it's > supposed to be Gate's rip-off of MacOS X features. Oh? Exactly how is the new file system (which is really what Longhorn is about) a ripoff of of OS X? It's a lot more than journalling (and journalling file systems are not new on UNIXesn, in any case, just something that OS X recently got). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
